Dev update: new tutorials, teleport pads and smarter Rival Wardens

Hi everyone, It's been about ten days since I wrote about what's coming in the next update, and a lot has happened since then. Here's what's new. All of it will be in the open beta.

New tutorials

The thing you've complained about most in the reviews is the tutorial, and you were right. So I've rebuilt the start of the campaign.

• Find the Dark Mother - your imps wake up alone in the dark and have to dig their way to their mother. On the way you learn to dig, build ladders and bridges, use the rally flag and the minimap, and fight your first guards.

• Build Your Lair - cooking, brewing, wells, mouse traps and fishing. Brew some beer and the Impanzees will come.

• Growing Your Own Evil - a bigger map where you place the rooms yourself, and the first waves arrive.

• The First Encounter - rebuilt from scratch, with a war film, a Dark Mother who eats your prisoners for mana, crafting, training and the Impanzee statue.

• The Poisoned Mother - a spell tutorial where you have to guide an alone Orc to find the human who posined your Dark Mother. Here you will learn how to use possession, lighting, poison cloud, gravity and all other spells to be able to defeat and trick your enemies along the way.

And more... But these will mostly be rewrites of the current once where we also will to defeat AI controlled Wardens - and I have to tell you, they are pretty tough to defeat.

The tutorials now pause and point at whatever they're explaining, and there's a new objective list in the top left with sub-tasks, checkboxes and progress.

Rival Wardens

The AI wardens have had a lot of training. They get their economy going in about ten minutes, defend in groups, split up into squads, combine spells, raid monster lairs and handle hills, water and lava.

• Teams - wardens can be allies and share what they see. Make everyone AI and you get to sit back and watch as a spectator.

• Hero raids can be turned off, if you only want to fight other wardens.

• On generated maps each Dark Mother now faces her own direction.

Railpipes

The hydraulics system is back! But maybe not in the original way ;)

Connect two pads with pipes and your creatures ride a chair through them, up and down the pipes and out of the other pad. You unlock them by having your Impanzees pray at an Impanzee statue. The statue will also keep on blessing your impanzees with faster spawning rate if the the impanzees keep on praying to it.

I added this because we need fast movement in large dungeons. I know there have been requests about having teleportation spells or being able to pick up and drop the creatures. But I need to follow the Dwelvers orginal design that the player should not be able to directly interact with the creatures. So this was the result on your feedback. I hope you will like it!

The humans come from the houses

Portals that connect the surface and the dungeon are now neutral. When a new wave begins, the "wave creatures" are born inside the houses and will venture to one of the portals, there they will wait until the next wave begin and then enter the portal and start attacking our dungeon as normal. There is one strict rule here - there may only spawn one human per house tile! That is what I think will make the end game more challenging, because you need to get up to the surface and destroy those houses, otherwise the human will win in the end.

I added this feature because of the feedback I got about there being no challenge after taking over all the portals - Now the challenge will continue until the whole surface world is destoryed.

And I will also allow digging and building on the surface just as in the dungeon, perhaps this could distract the humans from going down the portal directly... Lets see where this takes us! So many posibilities...

Female creatures

Every minion type now has a female variant, each with her own names. And the Impanzees' hair and beards now take the colour of their warden.

This has not been a request from you guys and gals, this has been a request from my wife! She have complained a long time why all the dungeon creatures are males. And of course she is right! So here we all go. The female creatures will have less strength, but they will have a faster attackspeed, so it balances out in the end.

When I showed this feature for Sebt, he told me that - "if we make female creatures we should also make male Dark Mothers." So perhaps a Dark Father and a Dark Brother is on the way ;)

More new stuff

• Prison menu - decide if a prisoner gets eaten, killed or converted, or let it run on auto.

• Decorations do something - paintings, lanterns, manacles, insignia, fireplaces and wall barrels give your creatures a boost.

• Fire pit - lights up and reveals the area around it. They work like watchtowers.

• Possession - have been improved upon.

• Faster terrain work - Holding down shift when digging will dig whole layers, and holding shift while building rocks will fill rock up to a height. This way it will be a lot easier to "plane out" areas.

• Info box for beds, vats and other room objects, showing what they produce, what they need and what's wrong. This will make it easier to understand if something is wrong.

• Dig and build on surface - You can now build and dig on the surface.

• Eat and drink standing - Creatures can eat and drink standing when there's no food in bar and there is food in the storage - but this will not get them as full.

• Wild antroots - Wild antroots grow near water.

• Patroling - Guards patrol their room.

• Rally flag behaviour - Rally groups march together instead of one by one.

• Faster starting production - A new building makes its first item in half the time.

• Imp spawning tweeks - Imps spawning rate is now halted if there are a lot of idle imps around. This is to avoid having to many imps in the endgame.

• Improved production chain - There have been a lot of testing and I have found a lot of small improvment possibilities here and there with the current production chain, and all these small improvement have made the production chain a lot more efficient. The biggest improvement was to focus on decreasing the amount of walking the imps do.

• Improved work assignement - I have been so annoyed so many times when I see imps doing stupid stuff. If I was a project leader I would tell them to do this and this... Oh yeah, lets add a project leader into the code! So now the code have a middle layer between the jobs and the creatures, and this is a job manager. This job manager decides what work each imp should do, instead of the imps deciding by themselves. This have lead to improvments such as building sites far away is handled my one imp carrying all the items over at once and then building - instead of having 10 imps run to 10 building sites far away with one item in their hand each. There are more improvment, but I can't take them all here.

Interface

• A new main menu with a Continue button and a What's New box.

• A new launcher with Low, Medium, High, Ultra and Custom graphics presets.

• New fonts throughout the game.

• In game messages are grouped in the bottom left, and a top bar showing productivity, storage, mood and health (you can see this in the tutorial screenshot).

• FXAA, view distance up to 60.

Fixes and performance

• Faster loading, and pathfinding now uses a fraction of the CPU it did. Fewer stutters.

• All crashes from the crash reports you've sent in since v1.2.4.3 are fixed. Thank you for sending them!

• Fixes from the bug list in the forum: achievements (Overcame The Trial).

• About 30 older bugs, among them creatures shooting through closed doors and heads spinning round.

What's next

Right now I'm working on a tutorial for spells, "The Poisoned Mother", and then it's testing, testing and more testing before the beta. If you find something odd, or have ideas, write in the forum. I read everything.

Thanks for sticking with Dwelvers!

/ Rasmus